Sunday, March 18, 2018

There's a moment when

Sometimes I think I wish I could meet you tomorrow and then I remember I have dwindled into pointless goo and if you do or don't deserve more you think you do and that's what it is.

But I did learn. I'm not always able to deploy what I learned but that doesn't mean I didn't. I just never learned anything of any use to anyone else. Yet.

And I do learn every day. One day I think I know something and then I know something else. And in between I have a piece of clarity, as though the symbols I have always thought I knew what I was looking at, I realise I did know know what they said.

That anyway is one of the bigger things to realise. That the marks and signs of human life do not say one thing. When you read, I don't know, Derrida, that's what he says, and you nod, but you don't get it. And then you get it.

***

I am a face on a telephone screen. You don't know who I am. That's okay, neither do I. And I know you're supposed to. I know everyone else seems to think they do.

But they don't.

It's just the mask they wear.

And sometimes I wish, I wish, I wish you would not be like me, that you will learn to live among these people, that you will find content among them, but I look at me and I look at your mother and I know that the chances are it will be an effort of will.

But even so I do still love her, whatever that word means, and I do wish she would let us try to begin your life with a different lesson.

Even so.

I want you to grow to never have a doubt. To do and be done to and live with it. To never be sorry, even if you have things you should be sorry for because after all what does "should" even mean?

***

I will always be sorry I put my own wellbeing over loving you but I genuinely truly felt it was that or die and I couldn't die.

When you are younger, you feel like you want people to want to know your story. Then you know what it is and you don't any more and that's when you know that you made your own world and you didn't know how to paint it in with colours so it is grey and bereft. And no one really wants to live in ashes but sometimes you have to.

And what is the solution? I laugh, as though I have ever known the solution to anything. Sometimes I feel like you just have to forget everything you are or wanted. When you have done that, you can die. And other times I feel like even that wouldn't be enough.

Monday, March 05, 2018

On Brexit

I'm beginning to think that We'll be worse off is not a good argument against Brexit. Because many Brexiteers hark back to the austerity years of the 1950s as a golden age. They think we are resourceful people who have had our national vigour sapped by dark-skinned idlers.

I think you can much more readily situate Rees-Mogg in the decaying greatness of Britain of 1950 than you ever could in Victorian Britain. The Victorians *were* vigorous. They expanded the frontiers of capitalism alongside the margins of science and thought. The 1950s was a time of stifling intellectual torpor, when even Churchill made sense.

The sad thing is that the clash is not between those who have privilege and those who don't, at least not at the street level. It's between those who think that they *did have* privilege and those who think they *oughtn't to have had*. While the truth remains that they never did, whatever they think. They just had the comfort of knowing that some were even worse off than they were. So 1950s white suburban man had a shit job and his life was materially poor but at least he had a female slave and he was English, for which read "white". It was worse to be dark, as the newly independent third world struggled to find its feet.

Thursday, March 01, 2018

To Ally

And I mean, I was not capable, not I didn't want to, because I wanted to.

And I mean, I was not capable, I know it, not I agree because I want you back.

And I do want you back. You are delicious. I do love you. You are so funny. I do love you. You are charming. I do love you. You can be kind. I do love you.

And if I know your value, I have to offer value in return. I know that but I did forget.

But I have no value, right?

I only feel like that because I fail in the ways that society, whatever that is, measures success, but I succeed in other ways. I can learn, and I have learned. I am healthy, and that health was so hard earned.

I wasn't healthy. We both know that. But I worked so hard to fix it. I really did. It hurt me and hurt you and while it feels external to me, of course it doesn't to you.

I had no idea how to learn that. I had to listen. I am so used to just talking talking talking I often forget that listening is how I learn. If I learn anything.

***

I spent so long asking what did I do for her to hate me? And it took so long to realise that the message is not what I did but that she hates me.

Don't hate me. I would beg if it would do any good. I never knew that it doesn't matter what a person does. You are loved or hated regardless what you think about it.

Forgive me and take me back. I do not ask you to love me. Just be with me for the sake of what we were and for our child. Be with me in the hope I am man enough to be the man you want. Be with me in the hope that the love you thought did not exist for you does exist, that I can embody it.

Say fuck it and be with me. I still want to give you thirty years. I want more than anything to do it better, to be worth the fuck it. And who cares what I want?

Tell me what you want. Please let us begin by you talk to me. Tell me what you want and we can decide if I can meet it. Tell me how I can be the man for you because you will always be the woman for me.

I feel foolish, humbled, tiny. I know that this is nothing worth a woman's love. So I am asking for you to believe, as I do, forever, believe in love, however alien belief is.